Rigorously confessional, ruefully funny songwriting wizard Brian ‘BC Camplight’ Christinzio certainly knows the meaning of turmoil. Although his introspective but vividly imagistic lyrics almost always deal with his persistent mental health struggles, each album he makes is so specific to his immediate circumstances – from his brief deportation out of his adopted Manchester back to the USA, to the loss of his father, to the breakup of his long-term relationship – that trying to sum up his life and work in one track is like pointing at a street and calling it a country. It’s wonderful to hear, then, that seventh album A Sober Conversation finds him in the calmer waters of post-breakup therapy and sobriety.
Album opener ‘The Tent’ proves from the off that finding a measure of peace doesn’t mean settling into complacency. A woozy, loping ballad broken up with synths which burble like a meter trying to get a reading on something, the music perfectly charts the tentative course between present discontentment and past trauma set out by Christinzio’s lyrics. Add a clatter of stumbling percussion, garnish every few bars with the distinctive cheeky ‘bink’ of the Roland TR-808’s legendary cowbell sound, and the ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ moment when his voice takes full-throated dramatic flight ends up feeling gorgeously incongruous.
The lyrics can be just as surprising. Christinzio rarely pours his heart out in a straightforward fashion, finding richer rewards in dancing around his most personal topics than tackling them head-on. Take the album’s title track, for instance. Kicking off with a killer opening line, ‘A Sober Conversation’ relishes the irony of being more mischievous and tangential than its name suggests, with its slightly oblique references to shunning David Bowie and being pursued by John Cleese.
There’s the welcome smack of the Divine Comedy to its puckish, galloping showmanship; the chorus is redolent of those instances where Neil Hannon breaks free of whimsy’s gravitational pull and soars up into anguish. With Christinzio forever reluctant to sit in one mood for too long, we immediately spiral back down to earth in a flurry of feather-light backing vocals – a payoff which has more in common with Thomas Dolby’s production for 1980s sophisti-pop favourites Prefab Sprout.
The preceding track ‘Two Legged Dog’ carries the same plush Prefab-esque texture, softening the edges of its dizzying eclecticism. But where Paddy MacAloon’s swoony angst came off as light cover for a pantherine security of self, Christinzio is all about doubt. Though it’s kept sweet by its sun-spangled new wave guitar and the plaintive country harmonies of the Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris, flying in perfect formation with our man’s reflective vocals, those easy-going hooks break apart every now and then to clang and clamour like an explosion in a belfry.
More poignant still, the crisply sparkling piano of ‘When I Make My First Million’ rises and falls in tandem with Tom Spencer’s spring-fresh flute, its solemn grandeur set against the touching modesty of Christinzio’s ultimately anti-materialistic ambitions. ‘When I make my first million,’ he sings, ‘I’ll buy a friend with my big salary.’ It’s not long before he starts reckoning with the reality of his situation, attempting to console himself with thoughts of gratitude and personal achievement. But the music holds no such reassurance, crashing into vast orchestral darkness with the shuddering horror of a sky full of stars suddenly winking out.
‘If I hadn’t seen such riches,’ one of Manchester’s most beloved bands once sang, ‘I could live with being poor.’ It’s a sentiment which Christinzio, who credits his move to the city with saving his life, seems to know well. ‘Rock Gently In Disorder’ begins with him instructing the listener to ‘picture your favourite dream […] and then pretend someone took it from you’, building from a softly crooned theatrical lament to a raging litany of commands spat sourly over a seasick siren wail.
But one of Christinzio’s strongest points as a songwriter (and he has many) is the way he leavens his explorations of self-destruction with a down-to-earth sense of humour. The blunt, endearingly unglamorous ‘Sunday at ten-to-six / I’m running towards my fix / cocaine and Weetabix’ furthers his existing fondness for references to British cultural mundanity (‘Kicking Up a Fuss’, from his last album, sees him ‘watching Dickinson’s Real Deal in a flea-bag joint’).
His ample wit runs deeper than a few well-chosen namedrops, though, and it’s often so comfortably moored in outright lovely music that it’s easy for a casual listener to overlook it altogether. The tragicomic ‘Drunk Talk’ is a haunting, weightless piece which finds real beauty in the teetering notes of its repeating melody, while the lyrics show Christinzio combatively exasperated by the self-concerned small talk of the people around him. As the song begins to drift away, the hope of meaningful connection seems fainter and fainter.
Indeed, although the words ‘Drunk Talk’ might be the antithesis of the album’s title, this record couldn’t really be called anything but A Sober Conversation. Christinzio credits his sobriety with making the music ‘more meaningful because it’s coming from a place of clarity’, giving him the mental space to work through painful personal history while he repeatedly structures his lyrics as conversations. This inspired welding of content and form allows him to write with remarkable incisiveness on especially difficult topics.
‘Where You Taking My Baby’, which sees Christinzio imagining himself returning to the summer camp counsellor who abused him as a child, is a particularly powerful example of the honesty enabled by his creative choices. After years of justified anger, he decides not to rage against his abuser but instead to hold a heartbreakingly polite dialogue, examining the idea that forgiveness is the best revenge with an unflinching eye as the music switches between airy balladry and pounding electronics.
By contrast, his sobriety is also front and centre on the album’s happiest, catchiest track, ‘Bubbles In The Gasoline’. A duet with his girlfriend Jessica Branney, this charming ode to getting through your life one day at a time has its trepidatious but undoubtedly buoyant optimism tweaked by the half-heartfelt, half-flippant way Christinzio breezes through the sticky-toffee refrain. He vows to take everything the world can chuck at him – ‘give me the love, give me the bad times, give me the romance’ – before a brief, desultory buzz of crashing guitar undercuts its feelgood sentiments, only for hope and resilience to swing back and win out every time.
The closing track ‘Leaving Camp Four Oaks’, an instrumental soundscape which mirrors the album’s opening with its woodland footsteps and unzipping tent, finally dissolves in a satisfying haze of synth drones and X-Files whistling. As it melts away, it’s hard to believe that the whole album clocks in at a slender 35 minutes. Not because it’s any sort of chore – on the contrary, it’s a stimulating, revealing, fearlessly searching delight all the way through.
But there’s enough here in the way of multi-layered ideas and emotional intensity to fill an opera. The record stands as a glittering hoard of lyrical and melodic gold that gets deeper the more you excavate it, revealing new treasures with every listen. If that kind of Sober Conversation isn’t worth having, then what is?
A Sober Conversation is out on Friday 27th June via Bella Union – order now via BC Camplight’s Bandcamp
BC Camplight is currently touring the UK – find all upcoming dates and book tickets here
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Review by Poppy Bristow
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